Who is Fusion-io and Why Did it Nab $47.5 Million from Top VCs?

Today, Fusion-io announced it landed $47.5 million in venture capital from a group of investors led by venture capital firm Lightspeed Venture Partners. This is a big slug of capital for a relatively little-known hardware maker. The storage startup also announced that a new CEO, former Novell executive David Bradford, and that its initial investors, including New Enterprise Associates, Dell Ventures and Sumitomo Ventures, have returned for this second Series B round.

Fusion-io has developed what looks like a game-changing technology and approach to the way data is stored in companies.

In a prescient story, my colleague Arik Hesseldahl wrote about the company last week. In his story, he noted that the company is gaining serious momentum: “Hewlett-Packard (HPQ) and IBM (IBM) both offer Fusion-io components in build-to-order servers. Steve Wozniak, who co-founded Apple (AAPL), joined as an adviser and now is chief scientist. And BusinessWeek readers, in an online poll, just voted Fusion-io the No. 1 innovation up-and-comer in the world.”

One Response to “Who is Fusion-io and Why Did it Nab $47.5 Million from Top VCs?”

Good news. Strong companies get funded no matter what the short-term economic climate. Fusion – io was just at InsideVenture conference where private growth companies took 1:1s with buyside small cap investors, strategics, VCs, iBanks and PEs.